The New Neo

Educators and people who set education policy are constantly tweaking college admissions standards in order to reach the holy grail of enough diversity, or the right kind of diversity. Here’s an article appearing in The Atlantic which offers a new and unusual suggestion. See if you can follow the logic here:

Universities tend to give a leg up to affluent, high test-scoring suburban [secondary] schools””which then incentivizes wealthier parents to seek out segregation. But what if those incentives could be changed?

And thus Scott-Railton’s idea was born: to take demographics of schools into account in college admissions””giving priority to applicants who attended schools with a certain threshold of low-income students (say, above 40 percent). In other words, admissions officers would look favorably on students who attended an economically integrated school, much as they do those who have had unusual travel experiences or outstanding extracurricular achievements.

In a nutshell, he argues, this idea would drive integration in three ways: It would create an incentive for middle class and wealthy parents to enroll their students in socioeconomically integrated schools, it would create countervailing considerations for white parents considering leaving currently integrated school districts, and it would provide an incentive for private schools to enroll more low-income students.

But the issue for most parents isn’t race per se: it’s the academic and social atmosphere of a school. The article completely ignores that fact—as well as the fact that affluent black parents in good school districts tend to have “white flight” (black flight?) if the demographics of the school change in a negative way by taking in a lot of low income students (I have a post about that somewhere; don’t have time to locate it now).

The reality is that economic demographics (which is what we’re talking about here) are linked with a host of things that affect the atmosphere—academic and social and even safety—of a school. I don’t think some slight advantage in the admissions process at colleges would compensate in most affluent parents’ minds (white or black parents) for what they perceive as a reduced atmosphere for learning and an increased amount of danger in the high school environment in which their children spend four long years. If the people proposing this new college admissions policy think it will stop white (or affluent) parents from pulling their children out of schools they perceive as creating a bad academic and/or social environment, they’ve got another think coming.

Another thing the article completely ignores is the issue of what happens to students who are given a leg up in the admissions process and who would not get into the college if they hadn’t been given those extra points. They tend to not succeed in college, or at least to have a great deal of difficulty there. This phenomenon has been documented many times, including in The Atlantic:

Over time, it has become a political lightning rod and one of our most divisive social policies. It has evolved into a regime of racial preferences at almost all selective schools — preferences so strikingly large and politically unpopular that administrators work hard to conceal them. The largest, most aggressive preferences are usually reserved for upper-middle-class minorities on whom they often inflict significant academic harm, whereas more modest policies that could help working-class and poor people of all races are given short shrift. Academic leaders often find themselves flouting the law and acting in ways that aggravate the worst consequences of large preferences. They have become prisoners of a system that many privately deplore for its often-perverse unintended effects but feel they cannot escape.

The single biggest problem in this system — a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research — is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively — even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.

We refer to this problem as “mismatch,” a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.

The problems are vast, and the sort of tweaking recommended by Scott-Railton and company seem doomed to failure, or to make the problem even worse.